Predictions of racial war

Press, 29 July 1978, Page 23

Predictions of racial war

Unless the South African Government drastically changed its policy, it would be overthrown in a full-scale racial war, said the novelist, lain Finlay, in Christchurch yesterday. Mr Finlay spent a year in Africa in 1976 researching these possibilities for television documentaries and his novel, “The Azaßian Assignment,” which has been released in the main Englishspeaking nations this week. South Africa was moving in a direction that might unite extreme Right-wing political groups with the country’s “all-powerful” Bureau for State Security (Boss) in inflaming antiwhite feeling in South

Africa and the black nations to the north, Mr Finlay said. As unrest increased West- i ern business confidence in the economy would decline, creating a pool of unemployment to be exploited by ter- i rorist groups. ; South Africa was deter- i mined to preserve the su- < premacy of its 4M whites ; and most of these would not ; countenance the prospect of i majority rule, lain Finlay i said. i The only way to avert racial war in South Africa * was for the whites to accept i the inevitability of majority < rule — “the sooner the bet- < ter, while there is still a reservoir of good will in the i country.” , If Namibia came to fade- ;

pendence under Sam Nujoma, and' if Bishop Abel Muzorewa or Joshua N’komo took over in Rhodesia, it was inevitable that terrorist training camps would spring up in those two countries, and South Africa would be faced in the north by four countries (Zambia, Namibia and Rhodesia, Mozambique) giving asylum to guerrillas and helped by Russian, Cuban and Chinese military advisers. No black African nation would resist the trends around it by disallowing the camps, said Mr Finlay. They did not like to “go it alone.” Threats of this kind would force the white South African Government into a protective autocratic stance

-■which would only increase i black hostility. It was only a o step from there to the ex-i t elusive use of Boss — with' t its responsibilities only toi g the Prime Minister’s Office; i, — as an arm to crush any! ej threat to the Government's “existence. a Mr Finlay said that the ) Government's "homelands' s policy” was “jabberwocky.”) i, It was not even a concession y to black political rights. It sought to remove blacks' a from environments in which s they had grown up and e worked, to areas to which j they had no attachment, and ’ which could be thousands of miles away. a Blacks in homelands had! e no part in the "real political!

■ and economic activities" of i white South Africa. The nine South African ‘ homelands comprised 13 per 1 1 cent of South Africa; the ‘ white heartland 87 per cent. ’ The heartland contained all > I the main sophisticated industrial and mining areas I “The longer white South I;Africans stall on the issue Jof majority rule, the greater ! the chances of change forced Jon them by radical eleJments,” Mr Finlay said. I How was white South t Africa to be persuaded to j accept the inevitability of C black majority rule? i “I don't really know,” lain Finlay said. “I recognise ■the problem but I don't II know the solution.”